There are a lot of different ways to make videogame fights meaningful. Singleplayer games do it by couching your shotgun blasts and pistol whips in the context of a story. Multiplayer games do it by emphasising competition via scoreboards, and by layering XP bonuses and equipment progression on top as rewards for each kill. Titanfall aims to do it with a mixture of all of the above, and based on its limited beta, finds mixed success.

Titanfall is a sci-fi multiplayer shooter in which you play as a futuristic foot soldier able to regularly summon a mech from orbit. The robot crashes to earth and then you can jump inside, piloting it alongside fellow mechs and ground troops like so many anime characters, across team deathmatch (“Attrition”) and capture and hold (“Hardpoint”) modes. I’ve been playing it since the beta launched late last week.

I say that it’s a multiplayer shooter, but Titanfall is one of a few games trying to remove the distinction. When you start it up, you’re immediately placed in a private lobby to which you can invite friends. If you play the tutorial, which contains no other players, you’re still online (I know because I experienced lag while playing it). Multiplayer matches are always six humans versus six humans, but the battlefields are populated by NPC soldiers on both sides, and the finished game will string together its multiplayer scenarios with intro and outro plot segments. It’s another take on what Brink attempted.

The beta contains a few maps, and no recognisable plot. It does have a lot of fighting, though. Immediate impressions: it just works, and far better than I expected it to.

A quick note: you might have noticed that these screenshots look like a butt. That is because my computer is a butt. I’ve ordered a new one, but in the meantime I appreciate that Titanfall’s modified Source engine scales down till its butt-graphics run smoothly on my butt-computer.

In so many ways, Titanfall is everything you expect it to be. The game’s developer Respawn Entertainment were started by the founders and many of the former members of Infinity Ward, the creators of Call of Duty, and it shows. Pilots are basically a slightly sci-fi twist on a Call of Duty soldier: you select your loadout from primary and secondary weapons (pistols, machineguns, shotguns, or futuristic equivalents), an anti-Titan weapon (lock-on missiles launchers, etc.), a grenade, a tactical ability (cloak, speed boosts), and Burn cards, which I’ll mention later.

Pilots are hyper-mobile. You can wallrun, doublejump, and you run extremely quickly. You’ll immediately begin chaining these moves together, leaping and bounding across levels without touching the ground. It’s far more forgiving than Mirror’s Edge’s parkour system, and any moment when I wasn’t wallrunning started to feel like failure.

After a two-minute build period/cooldown has finished, each Pilot has the ability to call down their Titan from orbit. The risk, I thought, was that Titanfall would feel like two separate games. This happens even with less outlandish concepts – Battlefield’s jets, for example, feel disconnected from the battle raging on the ground. I thought being inside a Titan would feel like you were playing a different game than the on-foot soldiers.

That isn’t the case. In one instance, While playing the Hardpoint mode, I found myself pinned down as I attempted to capture a control point. Instead of rushing out to try to fight my assailants personally, I peaked out from behind cover just long enough to call my Titan down outside the warehouse I was trapped inside. Three seconds later my robot landed, I flicked on guard mode, and he killed my attackers for me. I captured the point, ran and jumped towards him, and he caught me in the air before placing me inside his cockpit.

In that moment, my Titan felt like my bud, my best robo-pal, but I think it’s the animation that’s important. Clambering inside a Titan cockpit enables a different view mode, but it’s a seamless transition. The Titans feel like physical objects within the levels in a way I didn’t fully anticipate. That means you can do things like leap on the back of friendly Titans to hitch a ride, or do the same thing to enemy Titans in order to open their brain and start shooting it from point-blank range. That means that you can use your Titan’s robot fists to punch inside an enemy Titan and pull the pilot out from inside. That means you can call your Titan down from orbit and use it crush camping enemy robots.

It allows you to include interactions with Titans as part of that rapid flow from action to action. You’ll spawn, sprint towards the nearest building, and double-jump through a second floor window to get inside. You’ll find a room with the roof collapsed, and you’ll wallrun and leap to pull yourself up and outside. From there a double-jump takes you on to a higher neighbouring building. From there you’ll leap on to the back of a friendly Titan, until it passes close enough to the building across the street, at which point you’ll leap off and continue to the next edge.

Looking over, you’ll spot an enemy Titan on the street below. Leap down, attach to its back, and shoot its brains out. From this position, it doesn’t take that many shots to take it down. By the time the pilot inside knows what’s happening, there’s only enough time for him to eject, and the sudden propulsion of his ejector seat will fire you into the air with it. As you drift back to earth, you’ve already spotted your next target, and are double-jumping to land on the nearest available roof.

When I say Titanfall just works, what I mean is that it promises some core fantasy – that you will fight people and robots and sometimes be inside a robot – and that it delivers on that fantasy as much as you want it to. It’s a base, primitive pleasure. I’ve watched lots of people on Twitter snort at the enthusiasm for the Titanfall beta – like, oh good, another game with robots – and I get that. But you know, I’ve never done this stuff with robots before in a videogame. If you ever looked at an AT-ST or a Dreadnought and felt this feeling in your nine-year-old stomach, this ‘Mm, robots’-warmth, then Titanfall is fucking cool. This is my critic’s opinion: I think hanging with and from robots is fucking cool.

Right, but there’s that other thing, which is: how do you make videogame fights meaningful? Call of Duty did it with killstreaks, which tied your murderin’ to rapid increases in power. Titanfall has all these levels and unlocks and new weapons and challenges and the Burn cards. You can have three Burn cards in your loadout at a time, and you can activate which to ‘burn’ for the coming life just before you respawn. The cards only work for that one life, but they might cut 40 seconds off your Titan build time, or they might make your legs move faster, or whatever. They’re a nice way to make your character more specialised, and your fighting more rewarding, without overpowering your character in ways that feel unfair like a killstreak unlocking an AC-130 gunship.

But I don’t think fighting in Titanfall is as meaningful – by which I mean, as rewarding, satisfying, compelling, purposeful – as Call of Duty, or other games like Counter-Strike or Battlefield. And it’s the NPC soldiers that spoil it for me.

Titanfall feels like a large-scale game, more on a par with Battlefield than Call of Duty. The robots are three-storeys tall; maps have large opens spaces or cover more than a few city blocks. Yet there’s only ever six players on each team, some of whom will be on foot and some of whom will be in a robot. To stop you spending a lot of time alone, in empty locations, Titanfall drops NPC soldiers on to the battlefields. These are grunts, who are idiots, go down in a single hit, and net you a puckle of XP, and there are Spectres, who are idiots, go down in two hits, and net you slightly more XP.

Neither are fun or interesting or challenging to fight. They’re a source of ambient combat, like elevator music for machineguns. You can almost ignore them, as they’re too dim to kill you even if you run directly past them. The net effect is that they’re insignificant in themselves, but their presence serves to diminish the occasions where you meet another player. Discovering another player needs to either be frequent and dangerous, or occasional and startling. In any case, the NPCs create a bland soup for players to drown within. I worry that I’ll play it for a couple of weeks, reach max level, and then lose interest because killing never feels significant. And killing is what the game is about.

It’s only a beta. Maybe improved AI would fix it. Maybe a more specialised, max-level playerbase will fix it. Maybe having more maps and therefore more variety will render it moot. Maybe the story will be compelling enough to see me through. I can’t say, yet. I will return with a WIT when the full release plummets from orbit on March 11th.

After playing the beta for about five hours, I figured out that a) I like a lot of things about the game and b) it’s way too quick to kill a player, which breaks the game for me.

It’s not at all uncommon to kill people with just two or three hits, and when the guns are bullet-spitting SMGs and such, this is unacceptable. Give me everything else from this game with the gunplay of Unreal Tournament and I can die happy.

I’m not the greatest player of shooty games but I almost consistently have a KD of 4. The key is to move constantly, use your cloaking ability, use your Titan and be on rooftops as much as possible. With that in mind, the game becomes easy-mode, which I adore.

I also adore how they managed to make Titan battles not feel frustrating in any way. The fact you can eject by the time you’re ‘doomed’ means that you feel victorious even in defeat, it means everyone is a winner. That’s masterful design, right there,

There’s a separate KD for vs players btw, the headline figure includes AI kills. I think that’s part of the reason the AI are there – to stroke egos. Everyone comes away from a match having killed way more than they died and therefore thinking they’re great at the game.

Multiplayer games do it by emphasising competition via scoreboards, and by layering XP bonuses and equipment progression on top as rewards for each kill.
…
Right, but there’s that other thing, which is: how do you make videogame fights meaningful?

Do they have to be? Arena shooters are still fun. Been playing UT after hours with some colleagues, and it’s still every bit as great as it ever was. If your game is actually good, you don’t need to try to make it feel like “rewarding” work.

I felt there were two major problems wrong with Titanfall Beta. There were plenty of other things that could be fixed easily, but these two were written in the core of the game.

The first is the NPCs, as mentioned in the article. The NPCs are beyond stupid. I never felt threatened by them. They were running XP points that had the storm trooper effect. I came to the conclusion early that they were in the game not as a threat to you, but to give away your position as you shoot them.

The second was the titans themselves. I felt like they were greatly overpowered. Whoever got the titans first was going to dominate the battlefield. I generally just dropped mine down where enemies were located (killing any where it lands), then set it on follow. It gave me quite a few kills, it drew attention away from me, and by the time it died I was close to spawning a new one.

The titans themselves wouldn’t be a huge problem if this was just a mech game. Unfortunately, this is not a mech game – its a FPS where you have the chance to pilot mechs. The infantry combat was extremely tight. I loved the infantry combat; some balancing and feedback issues aside, I felt like it breathed new life into the standard run and gun. Upon playing it, I imagined 3D battlescapes where you were as free to move up and down as you were on a 2D plane. Sadly, the fact that Titans exist in this game ruins that chance. sure, you can go up and down a small block (generally just a single building). But the need to let the Titans stay mobile means everything is intersected with large, open roads. And those open roads killed the infantry play.

I had the opposite problem with Titans. Short of jumping out and and manually dealing with them, there appeared to be very little that a Titan can do to deal with even the least competent Rapid-Fire-Rocket-Launcher equipped pilot who stuck to cover on the rooftops.

I tried the tactic myself, it’s reliable. Titan-kill after Titan-kill with nobody to oppose me except for occasional pilots who randomly ran across me.

Yeah titans are fine. I got about 10 hours in the beta and I can now take out a titan on foot by myself using all the available tools. If your stupid about it yes they can dominate the match but it isn’t so much a balence issue as it is everyone is a noob issue and hasn’t figured out how vulnerable mechs really are in this game.

Yeah the fast mobile gameplay in titanfall reminds me of those old arena shooters which is why I think I am drawn to it so much. The game is just fun and that’s the only reward I need take this meta game crap somewhere else its a sad day when just having fun shooting your friends for no other reason than because its fun is seen as a bad thing in a video games.

I thought of something they should definitely add to tianfall that would make it even more awesome. a “stunt” button just like in the Old Action Halflife mod. If I could dive backwards out a window while shooting that bastard that snuck up on me instead of just running that would be awesome. please add thx

Well the point of the bots seems to be in the same vein as creeps in LoL/Dota, use them to farm XP and get your titan faster. I don’t like it as a mechanic though. They provide next to no added gameplay skillwise, just some random stuff to shoot that provides no challenge at all. Also not knowing whether you just spotted a bot that will die easily or actually a pilot that you have to fight is really annoying to me.

There’s just something not quite there with the game at the moment. Too many insta-deaths is another gripe I have, I think it would be better if you had more survivability on the feet, especially considering the guns are pretty much no recoil spam fests that are difficult to miss with, meaning the first one to spot the other will win the fire-fight 95% of the time.

Stomping around in a Titan feels cool and i’d disagree with them being too overpowered seeing how someone can just jump on its back and finish it off quite easily, I think once people get better at the parkour you are going to have to focus hard to defend your titan from this, at the moment they are just running away from it because “aaaaaaah, big stompy mech!”.

I completely agree with you. What exactly does need to be done to make the fights more meaningful than to just make a good game?

Its like we’ve completely forgotten class based shooters exist, or that teamwork towards accomplishing objectives is supposed to be meaningful.All of my favourite multiplayer shooters were of the team class variety not the stupid individual progression BS that everyone pines for these days.

I feel like when they say you have to make something meaningful by adding on all this crap its like they’re giving us busy work to get invested in. The game can’t hold you so it must be the perks!

Its interesting that multiplayer gaming right now so little resembles the spirit of the team sports kids play.

Yep, take Counterstrike. It’s sequel (CS:GO) is the second most played game on Steam, the original is still 7th on the list and its 14 years old, CS:S is still 11th on the list. It has no ridiculous gear treadmill trying to force players into playing for XP. Everybody goes into the match completely even, skill and tactics are the deciding factor.

There is no need for account levels, unlocks, anything of that nature. I wish developers would realise this. Where is COD on the list? Significantly lower, in fact 1/10th as many people are playing the most popular COD game compared to CS:GO. People aren’t arsed grinding out their account on COD as much as they are playing the exact same matches of CS they’ve been doing for years and years.

Just make a damn game that is balanced and competitive and people will keep playing it over and over without the need for breadcrumb trails and nonsense incentives that nearly all multiplayer FPS games feel are necessary at the moment.

Eh? Yes they are, at the start of a match, when everyone has the default $800 or whatnot. It has progression over the space of a few rounds, then it resets. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory did the same kind of deal over a few-maps campaign. If we’re going to carry it to an absurd extreme, in Quake 3 Arena you lose an even footing the moment one player gets to the railgun.

Short-term unlocking is fine. Persistent unlocks suffer from both bringing in F2P-y grind mechanics even in non-F2P games, and more pressingly (to me), meaning you can’t bring friends into the game without them having to sink weeks of their life into it just to enjoy all the same toys you’ve unlocked. For any of the above games, just wait until the next round reset.

Plenty of complaints about Titanfall’s bots in the reviews I’ve read about the demo, but I doubt Respawn are going to do much at this point to change their behavior. Bots are there for the benefit of unskilled players, and unskilled players are who the game is aimed at apparently, so…

No, that’s how it works, while noobs waste time farming and pushing towers, the pros focus on getting the kills, that’s what’s important in the end. After that, they can proceed to flame everyone else for their inferior KDA and blame everyone else for feeding.

If I ever feel like farming bots for points, I’ll go play Red Orchestra 2 on an empty server. I already own that game.

On a more serious note, the fact that players are so heavily encouraged to farm bots in Titanfall just to get their “killstreak” seems like more of a contentious design choice than a primary feature to me. Why couldn’t humans theoretically take the place of creeps? (That’s a rhetorical question, BTW. Respawn have made it very clear why they limited human players to 6v6. I’m just throwing it out there as food for thought.)

Because you would barely be able to move around as a titan if there were 24 of them on the battlefield? The only solution to that would be to make maps more open, which would make pilot gameplay worse, I feel. It’s already a little cramped on the city map if all of your team’s titans are out, and that map is way more fun for pilots than the other one.

@ xao: Then aside from being mobile bullet sponges for inexperienced players, what exactly are the bots in the game for? If they can be completely ignored, what’s their purpose in the game besides taking up space that could be filled by actual humans? I’m sincerely curious, as I haven’t played the demo. Do they have a purpose that couldn’t possibly be filled by real-lifers under any circumstance?

@ Deadly Sinner: Respawn could, as an example, limit the number of Titans allowed on the field if they ever choose to allow bot spaces to be filled by human players. I’m sure they could figure something out that would satisfy everyone.

@SkittleDiddler
If they made it 24 players, they’d have to make it a hell of a lot harder to get Titans to prevent overkill. Also, what happens when one side has 12 Titans and the other only 6 (Or less)? A losing round would be insanely shit in such a situation.
6v6 means players can get Titans often, without throwing the balance off if one team gets ahead. Also makes Titans less “precious” since they can be easily obtained, so players take risks with them. And allows the devs to make them easily destroyed (And they are, everybody’s just new to the game)
The bots lets newer players have something to shoot, so they can have a losing round but still have fun, which means they stay motivated and continue to get better, instead of just forgetting about the game.
Most of this is personal experience, I’m not a great player, and even though my first round ended with me at the bottom of the log, I had heaps of fun, and only saw just HOW much I sucked when the scoreboard came up at the end. In COD/BF, if you’re having a bad round, you KNOW you are having a bad round where you do nothing but run a couple of steps then die, never doing anything (Again, personal experience). The bots prevent this polarising experience.

The bots serve a purpose, and that is to enable the plays to fell special at all times. The majority of asymetical games have one problem. One team is not as fun as the other. L4D – special infected, Primal Carnage – dinosaurs. Titalfall lets you always play the fun team. The team with jetpacks and huge robots.

Punching one with a six foot first is quite satisfying.

I also think people haven’t quite learnt to play with the tools Tianfall offers yet. Using NPCs as sentries (they shout when they see enemy pilots) and cover (it takes you enemy a moment to shoot an NPC, that’s one moment not shooting you). Being able to hack the robots is a nice touch.

> Completely empty. I also think the 6v6 balance seems ok but I’d like to try more on a larger map or two.

If they did that, your titan wouldn’t feel as cool. It’d go down REALLY fast due to running into 4-5 titans randomly. OR they’d have to buff them up and then 1 vs 1 fights would be long and tedious. (Also, these maps really aren’t that big.)

Everyone says this, but in a 12v12 world you either have to limit availability something fierce or risk drowning under 24 titans. Then you run the risk of players going the entire time without riding one, players who get mercilessly farmed by people who DO have one. I think it’s a system that generated a lot of pure fun and excitement while letting players have sizeable impacts on the battlefield.

Only if you use the same spawn mechanic. But if you change it slightly, take longer spawn, link lower spawn of titan to taking objective, scouting, stuff not directly related to K/D, you could have more people, not bots, and still balane the mechanic so that there is no 12 titan against 12 titans.

I found it pretty dull after a while but it’s so close to being something amazing.

Looking at the gaf thread on what’s going to be there at the end it doesn’t seem interesting or exciting enough now I’ve sunk a few hours into the beta.

Maybe some more interesting modes and the addition of destructible buildings would start to open things up again for a sequel but with 30+ games and 20+ top three finishes everything just feels really rote now. Bring on a giant mech for 10 people to fight against, a carrier mode built around a mech factory, environmental elements that favour or hurt robots, something that uses the creeps in a moba way.

There are so few human players it just feels really easy to do the same things each level and finish roughly at the same point. Who know though, maybe the spike to take over AI bots and some more precise Titan weapons could spice it up a little.

I guess the long term prospects could really depend on the campaign multi-player. If that’s exciting and without the need to encourage (rage down a microphone at) everyone to play each level exactly the same way (looking at you Payday 2) then it could be more special.

But as it stands it felt like a point farm, just a playground to make all players feel great without a really competitive element. It hits hard early on then just fades away. One interesting experiment btw, try turning off the sound. It’s amazing how the sound design goes so far in this game to make it feel impactful. With the sound off it’s really oddly dull. Need to try that with a few other games now.

And despite claiming to be finishing high every game I will admit I got melee killed by a Spectre. My shame had never been higher.

The discussion around Titanfall’s AI bots is interesting. There are those who outright damn it and those who appreciate it, I don’t think either is wrong.

At first I outright hated the idea of the bots, then when I saw how dumb they were during livestreams I had almost dismissed the game if not for how much fun it looked.

They do a good job of making the battlefield more action packed and intense without having so many players that it becomes a killing field. They are a good crutch for bad players or even good players on a bad day, a little pick me up making it feel like you’re doing good even when you are not.

Likewise I like that even after Victory you can go for total victory by stopping the enemy escaping or even outright obliterating their escape ship, and in defeat you can escape with your dignity allowing you to recoup some points.

But every time I think about the AI in that way I feel like I’m being double-bluffed by Respawn who could have added them last-minute as a reflex to criticism of 6 vs 6.

Asides from the bots the gunplay is kind of meh and if not for the rest of the game being stellar it would be a disappointment.

I wish there were 10 or 12 players per a side, just because it is only possible to get a decent number of pilot kills (10+) when everybody else on your team is under-performing, and in turn resulting in a more challenging playing field that results in more deaths than two or three at maximum.

“But every time I think about the AI in that way I feel like I’m being double-bluffed by Respawn who could have added them last-minute as a reflex to criticism of 6 vs 6. ”
The bots were there in the first gameplay videos of the game (E3 last year). I also believe the game had more players back then, but I’m not so sure about that.

Yeah, they’ve been pretty open about how they experimented with different team sizes in development. I can’t see any reason to think they aren’t being honest when they say they found 6 vs 6 the best teams sizes for what they wanted to achieve.

Whether that’s what everyone else wants them to achieve to a different matter of course ;)

Fair point, didn’t know they had planned that from the start, though it makes sense with all their convergence of single and mutliplayer. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think 6 vs 6 is bad, considering I’m an avid follower of eSports and especially competitive FPS (in which 5 or 6 player teams is optimal for a game like this).

If the playtesting points to 6v6 as optimal but you allow larger sizes, you can bet that most servers will be larger sizes (without bothering to try lower sizes to find out if it’s better) and players won’t be enjoying your game as much as you hoped.

On the other hand — they have XP and unlocks and stuff, right? So they could just as easily say “you can make it larger, but 6v6 is the only official size, and thus the only ‘ranked’ size (where you can earn XP)”.

The big problem with the bots is not the fact that there are bots, but the way they are used in the available game modes. At present, the best way to play the Attrition mode is to wall run past the enemy team and camp the enemy bots as they spawn, farming them up until you have your titan. For one, that’s pretty dull. For two, it is an antithesis of a multiplayer team shooter. For three, it quite severely devalues the most interesting part of the game mode, the infantry phase.

In a different game mode, I think the bots would be fine. Something like a capture point map, similar to TF2 where teams start with two points each and fight over the central point, then try and push the other team back to take all five and win. Having an NPC army working with the players as opposed to being a resource to farm up and distract from the PvP would be infinitely better. They could even use them for balance purposes, spawning tougher bots for a team that is losing ground to facilitate a comeback. However, form the little we’ve seen in the demo, they are more of a dead weight than a feature.

Yep this is exactly my problem with the bots. It seems that at the start of the game farming bots is the most important thing because it equals a quicker titan. This to me is literally the opposite of what a multiplayer FPS should be. The game should be encouraging us to fight, not to avoid each other and shoot some mindless drones, if I wanted to do that I’d play some fucking Doom or something.
So the start of the game, at least in attrition mode, is who can parkour the fastest across the map and farm braindead bots. It’s almost making you compete more against your own team than it is the enemy and tbh it’s sucky.

That actually sounds like the worst way to play Attrition. Of course you *could* play it that way if you wanted to suck all the fun out of it. “Winning” doesn’t mean anything. You can still score a ton of points individually and have your team lose. It’s all about having fun. If you want to try to game the system just to score a “Win” for the team, you’re only ruining it for yourself.

Bots give a pittance in terms of scoring and timer reduction. You have to kill about ~30 grunts vs. 4-5 pilots for 2 min worth. Seems like a pretty terrible strat to me, especially since focusing on grunts makes you incredibly vulnerable.

The bots do so much more than just serve as filler for the levels, they fundamentally draw the players towards each other. They’re also a reward for having control of the map. Every time you fire your gun at an enemy, you’re giving up your location the minimap, and that inevitably brings the enemy players to you. It’s a risk – go for the extra points by killing the bots, or stay hidden from the enemy radar? If you’re confident in your control of the game, you pick them off like flies to rack up points without worrying about who’s about to come find you.

My biggest issue with the bots is how damn stupid they are. You can literally stand in front of a group of grunts and take your time jump kicking everyone of them with no fear of them killing you. They just need a little more to them I think but all and all I don’t mind them. I know a lot of people want more players but anyone who haas played for an extended period I think can agree this would severly mess with the balence of infantry vs. Titans. As of now usually the most you see is 2 or 3 titans up at a time unless someone is getting rocked. When the enemy team has 4 titans up infantry all but becomes useless. This is very rare occurance now but increase those player numbers and you are gonna have serious map balence issues. The grunt I think are a compromise in that regard.

yup, EA do “we will give you money to make a game, we’re paying the piper so we’re calling the tune” and also “we will publish your game” scenarios. EA published Valve’s Orange Box, and both Left 4 Deads, for example.

I’ve really enjoyed the few hours of the beta so far, but I don’t seem myself really getting invested in it. It was fun for a handful of matches, but I don’t see how the addition of a story is going to make it feel any more worthwhile or less short lived.

I don’t know if this is the right place to ask about this, but how is Origin these days? I’ve been eyeballing Titanfall and figure it might be a good bit of fun, but last I heard it required Origin and Origin was a terrible blight on your system that will steal all your data. Has it improved to the point where it’s just annoying, or are there still major problems with it?

I don’t hate it. It has caused me relatively few problems, although it’s propensity towards launching your browser, or opening other new windows can be annoying. So at times annoying, but by no means bad.

My only experience has been in the past few weeks, finally installing Battlefield 4 for the first time and now Titanfall. To its credit, both have downloaded fast (>20 MB/s, about what my connection can handle), both have downloaded in a preinstalled state (no installer to launch), and the second BF4 expansion arrived yesterday and auto-installed without a problem.

On the down side, it installs to a default location in “Program Files” unless you configure it otherwise and this can catch you out if you’re not aware of it (the “where do you want to install” is just for Origin itself, oddly), moving games is a pain (I moved BF4 via unofficial methods, and the core worked, but I had to nuke my BF4 DLC and redownload it), and it will randomly ask you for admin privileges when it’s updating some game (Steam normally only asks when you launch a game the first time).

All in all: Not as good as Steam, and I still wish they hadn’t abandoned that platform, but not the end of the world. I’m glad I waited as long as I did to start using it, but I don’t think there’s a huge reason to keep doing so, since it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop using it any time soon.

My experience is identical to wisq, but I’ll add that Origin has pretty fantastic customer support. I managed to return BF premium with little hassle, despite the fact that DLC isn’t really returnable and I waited a whopping two weeks to actually bother.

At the same time I was trying to get my Steam p/w reset (I have no idea what my favorite drink was 10 years ago, ffs) and it took me a full week of sending emails to a blackbox because they screwed up the first reset.

I like the bots. They give the impression of a larger battle raging, with you and your fellow combatants, the ‘heroes’ – all powerful super beings – having their own separate fight away from the petty grunts. I’ll shoot a bot if it gets in my way, or if I want to farm some attrition score, but like you said, you can ignore them and go after the jumping, whirling demi-god pilots.

The scenes, for example, where you burst through an open window and two bots are engaged in a melee wrestle and you quickly shoot the opposing team’s bot in the head and carry on your way, with the friendly grunt shouting a “thank you, sir!” down the corridor after you. I think that’s awesome and immersive. And makes me feel like a badass.

I agree, but i would like them to be a little bit more dangerous. If i bust into a romm with a squad of bots in it, i would prefer them to pose any danger to me. So it actually feels like an archievement if i take them out. Or at least forces me to waste a grenade or give away my position by shooting them. But instead i can easily walk from one to the next and kick them all down.
And when i see two opposing ones in combat, i would like it to look like some actual fight. But instead they just take a half hearted punch at each other every few seconds, not doing anything.
And thirdly, if i decide to ignore a squad and just run past them, it would feel more like a decision to run past them if i actually suffered some damage.
But most importantly, i would love if it made any sense to stay with a squad and advance together. But as it is, if i do that and some enemy pilot comes by, the duel between him and me is almost over before the grunts have even shot once. And probably most of them have died from stray bullets.

I am not opposed to bots and do not think there is anything wrong with the kill speed, but i would like the bots to mean anything except for points.

My big problem with it is that while it’s initially a blast, and the “everything-including-the-kitchen-sink” approach leads to a lot of novelty, there’s very little meaningful gameplay actually included. It’s suffers from the old Call of Duty downfall of having a relatively low skill ceiling, and that’s exacerbated by the sheer amount of stuff that’s going on, the extremely open nature of all of the levels, and the sheer power of some of the options on offer.

Satisfying combat with other players is a rarity, with most encounters being solved simply by virtue of the nearly-random quality of who ended up approaching the other from the most advantageous angle. (i.e. from behind.) In a game with universal cloaking devices, no choke-points and almost infinite approaches to any position, it results in very few deaths feeling like they were actually the result of being out-played by another competitor, and more like the result of a random cluster-fluke of chaos.

In short, it’s easy to learn, easy to master, and within an hour or so of play, the gameplay experience devolves into a massive zerg with player-input having little-to-no influence on the final outcome of the game, resulting in nothing but an empty, random grind through the default Skinner box-like rewards system.

It’s a great diversion for those who prefer an all-inclusive gameplay experience and just want to toy around in a big sandbox, but as somebody who thought the genre topped out with the single combat of Quake 3 and the tight level design and teamplay of Day of Defeat, Titanfall doesn’t quite float my boat. At all.

Bonus points for lacking in-game pre-order bonuses and micro-transactions though. Almost tempted to buy it as a statement to EA.

I’m curious how you reconcile your belief in Titanfall’s low skill ceiling with the wildly divergent performance of players. How do some players consistently manage games with only one or two deaths? Is it their connection? Meta-gaming?

Simple: I saw no such consistency. Player rankings over several games seemed completely random. Players who dominated in one or two games could just as easily land at the bottom of the board on a third.

I suppose that joypads vs mouse users may add a layer of mild consistency, but in a game where takedowns are so quick, there’s little chance that player-skill can be a factor unless you end up in the relatively rare situation of two players spotting each other at the same time.

As I mentioned above, due to the sheer manoeuvrability of the pilots and the completely open map design, this almost never happens.

Titan-on-Titan combat is a little bit more involved, if extremely slow moving, but that usually comes down to a numbers game. I’d be interested to player a 1-vs-1 game of Titan combat in more tightly designed maps, if things were sped up.

Check out the streams from some of the better players, they routinely put up dominant performances. To me, this indicates that while it’s possible for new players to have a good round or two, highly skilled players can consistently have good rounds.

I felt the smart pistol is a lot less annoying than expected. Compared to the other guns, it takes ages to log onto people. But it can do that while cloaked (not fully invisible). So due to its low range for locking, it kind of feels like a shotgun that can prepare its damage while cloaked but does less damage if not prepared. So it does actually feel like a assasin gun: Very good if the assasin is not spotted in time, a mere pistol if he is.

Having only played with the smart pistol for a couple of rounds, I think it is the hardest weapon to get pilot kills with. It basically forces you to change the way you play, since you have to stalk players rather than fighting them head on.

Feels like there is a lot of misunderstandings around the bots. The bots are not there for “unskilled players” they are not there to pad scores. They are there to provide a goal and to force people to fight. (in Attrition that is). If your team controls the map you control the AI and gets a lot of points. This was hiding and trying to avoid a fight is not a winning strategy. It forces everyone to go fight and make sure you keep your grunts alive.

Now Attrition have other issues such as way too short rounds.

In Hardpoint the grunts are largely irrelevant, they really should be able to capture points or somehow reinforce them to make them a valuable asset. Spectres are somewhat more useful in that they carry some fairly deadly anti titan weaponry, they just need to be faster in deploying them. This would also make them more valuable to hack.

From the gamemodes people have found in the game files there seems to be a variant TDM which sounds like it would do away with AI or at least AI giving points.

I thought for sure this would be the next great thing in online gaming, then I played the beta and was incredibly disappointed. For me, this is already a prime candidate for “Biggest Disappointment of 2014.” And yes, I know that it was “just a beta,” but we all know how that plays out 98% of the time.

Maybe it’s because I wasn’t expecting much, but I’m pleasantly surprised by Titanfall. The movement possibilities alone, with double jumps, wallruns etc. add very much to the standard COD formula, and the Titans themselves feel really cool and well integrated with infantry combat – a Titan can get many kills, but also a single soldier can defeat a Titan if he uses the terrain well. Neither side comes across as paricularly over- or underpowered and both are interesting to play and have their own advantages and disadvantages. You are not suddenly useless just because you lost your Titan.

My only two (major) complaints are:
1) It is a tad chaotic. With the bots and robots and everything, something is ALWAYS happening. True, it gives the impression of a larger conflict, which is cool, but it can also be hard to keep track of what exactly is going on at times.
2) The rounds are extremely short, at least in Team Deathmatch Attrition game mode. I haven’t stopped the time accurately, but it was definitely shorter than ten minutes. I know the main target group of this kind of game allegedly has a short attention span, but geez. It feels like the match is decided before you even get your bearings, and there’s no time for the match to develop any interesting dynamics, like a team holing up in a specific spot while the other team tries to smoke them out, trying to flank that position, all that stuff which happens in MP games with longer rounds.

I think the short round length is a deliberate decision made to maintain the feeling of fun even in a losing effort. It’s much less painful to get steamrolled in a ten minute game than it is in a half-hour game. Getting dropped into a hopeless match in progress halfway through is much less frustrating with short rounds instead of long rounds. I see this as an extension of the philosophy Respawn has espoused with the Epilogue system.

The downside is that shorter rounds make it harder to turn around a bad situation. Being able to choose game modes with longer or shorter average duration would be a nice touch. We’ll have to see what modes come with the full game.

Seems about right to me. Each team usually gets 2-3 rounds of titan combat, which is just enough to swing a match mid-game, but not too long for the titan imbalance to start widening.

You can tell it works pretty well because the Epilogue is usually a complete meat-grinder for the losers, but at the same time I’ve seen comebacks by teams that kept their first wave titans alive longer.

So its just another “hype the game up, sell the game, rely on peer pressure to sell more copies, further rely on people who are MALLEABLE enough to be told by friends and publishers that they want the yearly release. Tax people regularly for a game with limited replay value and encounters not based on strategy and roll in the big bucks.”

I felt bad enough buying BF4 premium – though I did abstain from BF3’s premium tax.

I played the beta and astounded by the frame rate and graphical performance – as a gameplay>graphics player I felt sad that I was bored after 2 rounds, even BF4’s hardcore 64 rush is more fun.

I wish the bots were actually a threat to you and your Titan. Right now if 3 grunts start shooting and hitting you, you do not die. They really need to ramp up their damage.

But, I do love hacking Spectres and making my own little infantry robot army. I think the ones with Archer launchers do some damage to TItans, but again its very minimal to provide much impact. They also follow you rather well. I had them launching up onto the rooftops to follow me.

I think the NPCs are dumb like that on purpose. While watching one of the many Videos of LetsPlayers playing the game, i saw an NPC draging an other, obviously shot down NPC, from the open street into the safety of a building while the player was battling aonther player in his mech.

That is pretty damn nice, i think, and speaks for the possibillity that the NPCs could be miles better a fighting, if Respawn wanted.

Immersion is definitely one of the points of the NPCs. I’ve seen NPCs trying to drag away wounded NPCs, NPCs in hand to hand combat, NPCs shooting dead NPCs in the head. I honestly love the immersive effect and I love their impact on gameplay.

It’s 2004 (“heavily modified”) Source engine looks horrible. The textures are MineCraft bad and not in a trendy ironic way either. I cannot overstate how jarringly awful this game looks close up on a PC on even the highest settings.
While such an old engine guarantees more stability (better than the launched version of BF4) the graphics are bland and very dated.
The game-play is frenetic chaos. It’s CoD with mechs. A run-and-gun twitch-shooter. You can sometimes go whole seconds between respawn and death. Each time you must wait while you get a replay of how the other guy killed you ala COD.
Titalfall is “Section 8″ circa 2007, except without riding the drop-ship down and with double-jump instead of jet packs. And Section 8 cost £8.99.
There’s nothing about this game that justifies the whopping £46 price tag. I have seen a number of F2P games far superior to this. Hawken to name just one.

Remember, there’s no single-player. It’s just on-line death match and a few of the usual variants (CTF, Assault, TDM, etc.). Maybe they’ll do a “2008 Texture Pack DLC” later, who knows?

You do not need to wait for the replay..hit space.
I actually think that MP focused manshooters like this or battlefield should do away with single playercampaigns..no one buys BF for thesingleplayer. Noone.
The game is excellent in hardpoint, contrary to me expectations. Just needed to throw water on some of the inaccurate, highly contrarian points you made.

There’s a lot of misinformation here. In addition to the points raised above, let me point out that it’s perfectly feasible for a skilled player to only die once or twice over the course of a round.

Respawn also opted for the Source engine for a pretty good reason: it has excellent netcode for a client-server model. In a multiplayer-only game, that seems like a reasonable tradeoff for the shiniest possible graphics. Also, make sure you’re looking at Beta textures. They’re significantly improved over those in the Alpha. I thought the PC: Insane graphics actually looked pretty good, given the mandatory FPS floor.

I think the bots could be smarter but I like them. They yell when they see another player, you can blend in with them and kill other players, you can hack the opposite teams to put them on yours and they CAN in fact kill a player if you aren’t paying attention.
Yes they could be better but I don’t think they are TERRIBLE. Imagine the battlefield without them. Completely empty. I also think the 6v6 balance seems ok but I’d like to try more on a larger map or two.

What i really miss from most previews so far is that noone seems to appreciate the level off detail and atmosphere they managed to put into a multiplayer fps.

While it lacks the shader bling of games like bf4 the interior off buildings is often nicely flashed out and theres a lot o variety throughout the map. You can easily see that the wrecked room you are fighting in was once housing servers with lots of wires and complicated machinery even under the floor you are standing on or in other cases a living room with sofas, lamps and a painting.

It doesnt look so flat and copy pasted like in other games., it just feels way more “handcrafted” than other recent releases to me. This attention to detail and the attempt to create a atmospheric environment continue through everything i have seen in the beta. Leveldesign, animations, sound cues for the ai grunts and even the descriptions on the burn cards.

I wish people would give them more credit for this instead off trying to find some sort of flaw in the well balanced gameplay mechanics. Game is a 10/10 for me so far and i went into the beta with a pretty sceptical attitude.

At the same time, to me at least, there’s no great artistic vision behind the visuals. It just looks generic near future warzone. There’s no great sci-fi cityscapes, the buildings are all kinda small and boxy, the textures are just the usual broken concrete, grass and dust. The character models, mechs and guns are nothing we haven’t seen before. I think they could have done a lot more with it artistically.

I think a lot of people misunderstood the game and doesn’t seem to appreciate the depths it has to offer.

At the beggining, I played the game like everybody else : it looks like a CoD, so I should play the same, with the addition of new shiney-but-not-that-useful movements. Bots are just there to bring more immersion to the game by making it feel more of a warzone, but doesn’t add that much to the gameplay. It felt like they were just pretending to make something new out of old pots.

But, everytime I met another player, the battle didn’t last for long, either kill or be killed, most of the time in less than a second. So I tried another strategy, avoiding other players, and getting Titanfall points with bots. So I’d go and farm them to get my Titan as fast as possible. Then I realized other players could do the same, so in order to prevent them, I could try and protect my own minions. Which definitely gave me a MOBA feel. When you spot players, you look at your map to see if you have enough players on your side to engage them or not, and if not, you just go on the small alleys and buildings to get easy kills for the Titanfall.
Meanwhile, my ability to move through the terrain got better, and I realized that wallrunning actually speed you up, and that you can chain wallruns infinitely. That combined with the speeding ability (which means you can’t take the cloak ability) makes the game a lot faster, and you have to think about optimum paths to get to one point from another. And you realize that bit of board can be used to wallrun then jump on that far building, the one you never thought you could reach before. That redminded me a lot of Strafejumping in Quake (except that, I have to admit, it is way easier to execute on the keyboard than Quake’s strafejumping). And, just like Quake, it feels worth it to start the map alone just to practice moving around.

Once you get your Titan, you are constantly aleterted that “Be careful, you are engaging a greater number of enemies”, which again reminded me of a MOBA. The mode Last Titan Standing increased even more that feeling for me.

This is just a giant MOBA game with movements and abilities inspired by Quake and UT. The more I play and I watch streams, the more it seems to be true and the more I realize the metagame is a lot more complex than what it seems. The learning curve is not what we would expect from a classic FPS. Its not that much about aiming and shooting, but more about decision making, when to engage, when to go in creep farming mode, when to drop your titan and where, what build suits more my playstyle, and probably more things that I haven’t been able to grasp yet.

I think most of the people doesn’t understand how the game should be played. Because it is very recent, because the multi-level gameplay can be confusing when we are just looking for a FPS and probably because most of the people are too eager to place it on the “Another CoD-like” box. You’re all tired of Call of Duty, yet you all seem to try and think of all new games as being CoD-Like.

This is genuinely something brand new, in many ways. It is definitely more complex than it seems to be, and its the most fun FPS multiplayer game I played in YEARS.

I never thought to compare it to a MOBA (a game I’ve never had any patience for) but you’re right about the depth and interlocking systems. NPCs are best viewed as an environmental resource. One to be farmed, contained, exploited and occasionally cleared out. I’m honestly really, really surprised at the depth of this game.

I’ve not found a multiplayer game to be as engrossing as this since Bad Company 2.

The thing that ruins the game for me is that it feels like just another Call of Duty, despite it trying a few new things. It has the same zero recoil guns and the mechs are like more accessible killstreaks, turning the fairly small maps into an overpowered clusterfuck like the poorly designed Battlefield maps that have way too many vehicles on them. The bots are so dumb they just end up being fodder and it feels like they were only included to make the 6v6 games feel larger. The parkour elements, while executed well, do not seem to be taken advantage of by the maps. There’s nothing that I can accomplish with the parkour that feels like I couldn’t do it without that, I just do it slightly faster. Maybe that will change in the release version, but I’m not paying $60 to find out when the rest of the game isn’t worth it.

From my experience, I think the game would feel better if it was either a pure mech game, or a pure infantry parkour game. Mixing the two feels very unbalanced in the same way that Call of Duty is, but I’m not really surprised considering who made the game.

I know the vast majority of people disagree with me but I’m used to it, being one of those who loathe Call of Duty.

I agree. It is CoD with mechs. It may be a direct upgrade from Hawken but that also only held my attention for a couple days. I would like to see MWO merged with ARMA 3 style fps combat and scale (not the engine though). Playing TF while its free but that will be enough for me.

Feels more like Quake with ironsighting to me. I had my running setting set to “delay” so I would almost always be running around unless I was strafing or aiming. I agree on your assessment of the bots and I think that’s just what they’re for, to be fodder for farming quicker titanfall and make the match feel like a large scale battle.

They were going for a ton of ambiance in this game and some sweet movement.